Your $10 Date Night Tops, Now Available Sans Guilt

By
Anna Breslaw

May 14, 2013

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Next time you're fighting a jungle of other women over a pile of cheap cotton T-shirts at H&M or scoping a Gwyneth-esque black blazer at Zara (I'm wearing one right now!), you can take heart that it didn't come from dangerous labor conditions.

A slew of international retailers, including H&M and Inditex—Zara's parent company—just signed a sort of standards and practices safety agreement for factory and warehouse workers that includes regular safety inspections and severe punishment for brands that don't adhere to updated safety laws, according to USA Today. It also encourages workers and unions to take part in the process.

However, this encouraging step came at a steep price. On April 27, a garment factory building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,127 workers. As if that wasn't enough of a karmic sign, this past week, a sweater factory fire in the same country killed eight more garment workers, which sped up the signature process on the new safety contract. An official statement from H&M aims for new garment factory conditions "in which no worker needs to fear fires, building collapses, or other accidents that could be prevented with reasonable health and safety measures." It's about time. Christ on a cracker.

The two popular retailers have no shortage of unethical labor abuses behind them. Last August, Zara—which currently boasts 5,900 stores in 85 countries—was busted for forcing "slave-like" 16-hour shifts on undocumented workers from Peru and Bolivia, the youngest being 14 years old. They were paid the equivalent of seven to 12 U.S. cents per garment sewn. Inditex, naturally, still insists that they had no idea this was going on.

H&M, meanwhile, was accused in 2010 of cutting up last season's coats and tossing them in the trash in the dead of winter, according to Treehugger. And the same year, a fire in a factory that supplied H&M killed eleven thanks to a blocked fire exit and non-functioning fire extinguishing equipment.